


Why We're Here: A Series of Monologues From Persons Living and Dead

by Koruga



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fan Audio Series, I apparently have been given this work because my cowriter/partner deleted their original account, Voice Acting, so just for the record I only am partially responsible for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-04-07 16:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 11,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4270476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koruga/pseuds/Koruga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"While the law has many penalties for the atrocities we inflict on others, there are no punishments for the terrors that we inflict on ourselves." - Dr. Leonard L. Church</p><p>Yet, nobody punished Allison for the damage she did, and it was certainly not limited to the Alpha. "Atrocities we inflict on others" indeed.</p><p>*Nukes will be dropped! People will die! Connie will....do whatever she does!<br/>*This is a world of politics, torture, poorly written erotica, and new allegiances.<br/>*This is a world where Simmons is an Agent, Carolina is a Blue, and Kimball is a Fed.<br/>*This is a world of detailed warfare and a Chorus unlike anything you've seen before!</p><p>This is the world of Why We're Here.</p><p>Welcome.</p><p>Updates with monologues, commentaries, and other work, sometimes recorded in audio.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Successor Project

**Author's Note:**

> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoDz_JN6guVi1-WWoDA5ZmA/

[SOUTHQUEST](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4808303/chapters/11007341)

 

**Southquest is the successor to Why We're Here, acting as a regular fanfic, but one that is far larger than anything anticipated for WWH.**

**It's 87 chapters long as of this writing, and it's constantly being added to.**

**Please check it out.**

 

 

**Thank you.**


	2. Hello.

Hello,

My name is Adam. Along with Koruga and several other contributors, we've spent the last year of our lives working to bring an alternate vision of Red vs. Blue to life.

This all began when Koruga and I's roleplaying universe grew so large that we decided to turn it into a fully-fledged AU. Fifty pages of (now mostly obsolete) documents later, and the beginnings of Palette Swap were formed.

From Palette Swap's false starts, emulating the episodic format of Red vs. Blue, among other technical glitches, the project was forced to be retooled into Why We're Here.

Right now, Why We're Here has dominated our minds, pushing us through anxiety attacks and depressive episodes to continue creating our vision of Red vs. Blue.

A world of a dangerously clever Felix and a Chairman with a little more depth than simple greed, for starters.

This is Red vs. Blue in a totally different light, with characters who are able to be given a lot more depth than the show can provide, and stories about everything from psyches to empires.

However, WWH is draining to create, and without fans enjoying it there's really little reason to go through the exhausting process of assembling voices from across the country, on top of writing extensive scripts.

I'm sorry for the obvious plea, but please comment. If you enjoy this world please tell others.

This is shameless self-promotion, absolutely, but it's also kind of the last-ditch hope for a dying project.

 

Thank you very much,

Merc Popcorn


	3. Agent Zeta and Project Mercenary

Transcription: Agent Zeta

*tap microphone twice* I think this is working. Hi, my name is Agent Zeta, from Eris Industries. I've also been called Richard Simmons, Dick Simmons, Penis Simmons, Johns- I was teased in school a lot, okay?

Anyway, this is the story of how I fucking died. *rhythmically* Let's go back to a thousand years ago. Everything I owned? Owned by Cele- Shut up. My jokes are just obscure! Fine. Anyway, I was born in 5230. You know, when Slipspace actually won a trophy? It happened. Don't bitch. We fucking won. Woo! So, my dad, Richard Simmons Sr., was an amazing man. He used to tell me that the world didn't make any sense, but that people would realize how good I was inside and see that I should run things. I loved him. Then he fucking moved away. To Earth. He apparently had a doctor job he had to do full-time down there, or something. I was seven and I really was too distraught to care. That may have left me with some psychological issues.

This was around my first few years of school, which like the rest of my school career, basically sucked. I had a stupid name, severe test anxiety, and maybe a superiority complex? Just back then. I was picked on and basically ostracized, and any attempt of mine to use my incredible knowledge to basically blow away everyone failed me because I froze up. A lot. I...I had a terrible report card. My best tested grade was a seventy. Not stellar. Luckily, I met Davis Hargrove, later to be codenamed Delta in one of our Union's most shameful breaches in ethics. I'll just say Delta, despite there being a second Delta, who I will get to. So Delta was old enough to be a hired tutor for me, and he basically taught me enough to code some really cool shit. Maybe some illicit hacking. Possibly. He was also.....kind of...my....dad...sorta... He kind of filled that role for a while, okay? He'd actually fucking reassure me, and help me, and tell me I had talents. At this point, my Mom was trying to get me into the army, and Dad was never around, so of course I was going to imprint on someone!

So, I make it to this student tech exhibition based on my assignment grades alone and a practical demonstration. I fucking rigged up ten printers to print out paper in such a way to sound out the motherfucking national anthem. I may have been kissing slight ass with that, but I digress. This was kind of a high point of mine. Sure, I had to get Delta to actually operate it for me, because I was terrified in the bathroom, but the coding and wiring was mine. I got a whole award, signed by this big scientist guy who I completely forgot and everything, and came home to a satisfied mother. She was a great person, just....she had an irrational thing for the military. But then I got into Tranquility Polytechnic. Yes. There. The fifth biggest tech school on the Moon. On a demonstration alone. Well, also all of my non-anxiety-ruined assignment grades and stuff.

Anyway, I get in, and even though I've got Delta talking to me and helping and shit, I flunk out. First year. It was a nightmare. I was drunk and pissy and scared shitless. This one time I literally chained my dorm room shut to keep one of my few friends at the time from seeing me in terror. My roommate locked me out of the room once because he said it was the only way he’d have it to himself, and I spent the night in the laundry room.I wasn't teased as much, but I was just kind of avoided. Story of my fucking life.

So I finally decide to join the Army like Mom wanted, and I go through basic a complete failure. I can perform, I just don't. And that's why Church brought me up into her little Freak Show Mark II. Oh. *mock sarcasm* I'm sorry. "Project Mercenary, Phase Two". Yeah, sure. You're so fucking official. Oh. Right. My life. So I join. You see, Eris Industries would be founded by the amazing and noble Delta a bit later, so I couldn't get a job there. But I join, and they say to me. "Private Simmons, our hacker was killed in action, so we need a new one." I'm like, "Yes, Ma'am!" I meet up with my supposed squad mates, and I'm honestly not surprised. The driver's this big fat smoking misanthrope who immediately hates me, frontline one's a complete moron, and I mean a moron. Frontline two keeps hitting on teammates and is basically only useful because he has half a brain and can fight with a fucking sword. It's 2550 and he's using a sword. Who does that? I promise you, Master Chief never used a sword to defeat the Covenant. It's insane. Oh. Right. The team. There's also this one girl who does nothing other than get the driver angry, and Sigma. Dear, foolish Sigma. Basically, this guy replaces Delta in my mind for a while, and I idealize his every fault. Anger becomes strength, foolishness becomes decisiveness, blood thirst becomes courage. Somehow, I even thought he cared. I thought that Auto-Shotgun Sarge cared about me. Yeah, that gets kicked in the balls later. Okay, so they introduce this new agent. He's an AI, but nobody knows it. He comes in, kicks the asses of Shitty Delta (the moron), Gamma (the swordsman), and Sigma pretty handily. I mostly remember because I started to call Sigma "Sarge" for a while to try and boost his spirits. It didn't work. At least Beta the Robot Space Warrior's competent and professional. Well, by Asylum-II standards.

You might be wondering, why would anyone create such a terrible army? Well, they had this one AI they called Alpha. It talked to us. Gave us commands. Orders. Tactics. The idea was that marginally-effective soldiers would be more easily worked with by the Alpha than good soldiers. I'd later learn what happened when they tried that. Not pretty.

So, anyway, Director Allison "I literally could not manage an army to save my life" Church sends one of our best agents, Upsilon, away to "Classified Assignments". This is also known as babysitting her misanthropic, hateful daughter. It sucked, because I liked Upsilon. It's a shame he died. Liked us to call him "Dad". But, trust me, he's not the first person I'll tell you about who died. Anyway I remember two pretty distinct letters I wrote to Delta during my time on Merc-II. They kind of bookended this really fucked up mission. Basically, the first one was really hopeful and optimistic and shit, and used a lot of really happy adjectives to describe Sarge. The second one...wasn't.

Basically, here's how Operation: Get a Insurrectionist Briefcase went. Agent Delta gets his dumb ass blown into a wall by a jetpack malfunction, and I get melted fiberglass inside of my face after a big guy with a flamethrower hit half my helmet for a few seconds. That's not the worst to happen to my face that week, but whatever. So, I'm screaming like craaaaazy, and Sigma goes and basically pisses everything away by getting competitive with Beta, letting the briefcase get away, and actually inviting the flamethrower agent to where driver Iota and I were on the road in hopes he'd kill Iota. What a fucking tool.

So I eventually get knocked out- I didn’t faint -by all the heat, and when I wake up, it feels like they're driving buzzsaws around on my melted facial nerves. Because that's exactly what they're doing. They cut out skull, muscle, flesh, it was horrible. You want to know what it feels like being turned into a cyborg? That's it. Sarge gave me this shit in my face. The screws and plates and all. Fuck you, Sarge. Luckily, things got kind of normal when Iota's weirdness-magnet sister Eta disappeared. She was just...ugh....I can't even get into Eta. Luckily, nobody looked for her. Iota was practically jumping up and down. This one fucking time, he tried to bitch and moan to me for an entire evening about how she ruined his life or whatever. Like, she built up his binge eating disorder and depression by partying all the time and ruining the house and leaving used condoms on his bed and shit. Who gives a fuck? I may have been really pissy after getting my face cut out, but I basically was just like, "Dude, I do not give a shit about your problems, I want to sleep. Go to sleep!". It's weird. Sometimes, I wonder if Iota and I could have been real friends if I had been less of a complete douchebag. Then I remember how annoying it was listening to him, and that goes away. We had movie nights. Saw a bunch of Harry Potters, Platoon, all of Parks and Rec, and the Twilight Zone. The original good episodes, not the remakes. Agent Chi made popcorn, and kept suggesting terrible and/or horribly explicit movies for us to watch. Even Gamma wasn't interested in either. Chi's a good kid, he's just annoying. Basically, this was during our actually successful missions against Eris- ERM I MEAN THE INSURRECTION WHO IS TOTA- they were fucking idiots. Also, Sigma built a robot. A useless, Spanish, mechanic robot. His name is Lopez, and he's missing in action. Also, from the little I could guess, Lopez was a dick.

Oh, wait. Sarge, Tucker (You know, Agent Gamma), and Beta all broke out, then broke in, killed a ton of people, and basically fucked everyone over. And then the Alpha was tortured. Again. You see, they had been torturing the Alpha for fragments for a while, but they never got anything. Until they got memories. Epsilon. A new AI. They kept that thing at HQ, and they shipped the Alpha to Valhalla. And then Tex became a bone fide badass gunslinger wrestler soldier. I fucking loathed the Alpha, but I have some grudging respect for Tex.

So Delta (Hargrove), has basically established Eris Industries, and by the time PMC-II ends, I'm sitting right hand to the Oversight Sub-Committee Chairman and CEO of Eris. Said Chairman investigates Dr. Church's whole web pretty thoroughly under ethical reasons. Also, as probably a personal vendetta. He calls me up, now Eris employed openly, to get these sim troopers together as witnesses. I salute and get to work doing my job. I find the first set of them up by firing squad, despite only two of them having done anything wrong. York, North, and South, everybody. Round of applause, everybody. *clapping, then sigh* I pick them up before they go the way of Agent Delta, and then I find the Beta AI, now armed to the fucking teeth and fighting some British sergeant guy. He comes along, because he's a victim of Church and we're all testifying or providing evidence anyway. Said sergeant (Still superior to Sarge) comes along to manage the Reds, naturally.

I enter Blood Gulch on Delta's information, and find the Director's daughter herself, and this one kid who reminds me of me. It's really kind of saddening and horrible. We raid Mercenary Headquarters inside of a tank. I find this huge monster, in white armor and wreathed in holographic flames there, too. Jumped out of a Pelican. Looking at it I hear laughing and mocking and hate on one side, and just pure force of will on the other. It was...well....it was something. WE ARE THE META. Just, cut into my brain, as if by blowtorch. We are the Meta. I think it wanted Epsilon. Well, it got it. And that was the really scary part. It just did. It got her. I entered the codes as fast as I could, and then hit the EMP. And that was that. Yeah, I'm going to talk about something else, okay? Eris got the body. That's it.

Onto happier news, I was arrested! Luckily, Delta bailed me out. Seriously. could you see me in military prison, solitary or no? Yeah. No. Anyway, I team up with Maine. Maine's the poor sap who became the launching point for the Meta, and he's the guy the heroes got the body of. He's like an animal now, but I had to team up with him. He wanted Tex, and we could convincingly lie to him that he would get it. I also asked the kid, Wash, to join up on our quest for Tex and the other PMC armors. It was all for my new job as Recovery One. Delta got it for me. All I had to do was tell him about what the Sim Troopers were, and he's an honorary Eris agent. I tried to bond with him! Really, but I think he just wanted to help the Red and Blues. Poor kid.

Eventually, I chased Sigma to a mining outpost, and we talked. For like, an hour. He asked me where I came from, me as well, and just how things went in our lives. Then I got to confronting him. I told him everything. What he was to me. What he did to me. How he hurt me. How he fought for someone evil. How he fought for torturers with murderous abandon. Just...what he did. Bullet through the visor and a "Wash, get the armor and check his logs". later, and Agent Sigma was dead. Found Chi holed up with him. I stuck a sticky grenade to his face and walked away. Just walked until his skull exploded. He was always good with grenades. I should use this as an example of irony. Zach Miller back on the Golden Apple keeps using the word "Ironic" wrong, god, it’s so annoying. Whatever.

Anyway, Maine and I have to go and capture the terrible medic. She was awful. She used a pilot's callsign for some reason. Insane. UGH. So, we've got everyone ready to go. And then? And then some mocking orange asshole parachutes from the air and snaps my neck. Never knew him. He just killed me. It was all pointless. So horribly pointless. I don't know his story. I don't know the story of anyone but myself, really. It's all just a pointless life to a pointless death, speaking from experience. I was the good guy, right? Why didn't I get a logical ending, let alone a decent one? Good stories don't end this way.

 

> **Yeah, this was one of the scripts I wrote, as opposed to the other Merc Popcorn people. It's essentially a primer into a good chunk of the world of WWH, and is a nice baseline for the others.**


	4. A Guide to Why We're Here

This is Why We're Here, a series of monologues about an alternate Red vs. Blue, from DC, Larz, and Adam, collectively known as Merc Popcorn.

 

** Everybody's story is different but here's the basics: **

1\. Alpha's based off of Director Allison, and Beta's based off of her memories of Leonard.

2\. All AI not named Alpha and Beta are part of Project Mercenary, Phase One or "Merc-I", a series of projects to create ideal soldiers, using psychological conditioning, trauma, and some **_really_ ** weird sci-fi surgery. Most of them are dead. Gary is now the President of a dictatorship on Chorus, O'Malley was installed into power in the New Republic (Which has not gone well), and Sigmund Anderson has been buried after he tried to become God.

3\. The Reds and Blues are part of Project Mercenary, Phase Two, or "Merc-II", essentially an attempt to get mediocre soldiers to work under the direction of an AI, to compensate for the failure that was Merc-I.

4\. If you're a Freelancer, you're now a Red or Blue.

5\. Chorus has multiple stages of development, and nations rise, fall, conquer, are destroyed from within, and more.

6\. We won't say what's in its place, but there is no Alien Purge. 

7\. Almost all characters have new stories. Heroes may develop into villains, bad guys might win, and the whole series is generally more morally grey. This includes some obscure characters, such as "Volleyball", or Carmen Valentina in Why We're Here, who become major characters.

8\. There are often voice-acted recordings on Youtube based on the monologue scripts, though that isn't always possible.

9\. We, here at Merc Popcorn put up other things, from creator perspectives on characters to things like riffs that might not be related to WWH.


	5. Merc Popcorn Radio: Who Is Zeta?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MP member Adam describes what makes Zeta different from Simmons, and why we chose to open with him.

Direct Link:

<https://youtu.be/GPirzPo3jq8>

 

Here, a few days before the launch of the next story, is a short talk about Agent Zeta from a writer's perspective.


	6. Lt. Bitters and the Beginnings of Chorus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is very much unlike the Zeta monologue. Whereas Zeta is closely associated with a lot of other characters and his story has a similar tone to Red vs. Blue, Bitters is more of an experimental piece, and a very troubled one at that.
> 
> If Zeta is what WWH's baseline is plus some interesting character of his own, Bitters is where it can go.
> 
> By the way, Bitters will not be the only darker story on Chorus.
> 
> NOTE: Due to a bug in which the Bitters video has been cut short, the video has been taken down from Youtube and Drive. We're very sorry that only the transcript is available.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoDz_JN6guVi1-WWoDA5ZmA/
> 
> Here is where the actual recorded monologues are. We highly recommend checking them out, as things are changed or improvised. Also, words words words words, so the audio is not a wall of text. This is good.
> 
> If the script and audio contradict, the audio is canon.

 

Transcription: Lt. Bitters

 

My life was pretty damn good, until the last few years. I grew up alone. Less generally, I was born to a single parent and I had no siblings. This started up a really nice precedent of me being alone and having to talk to not many people. My dad was a nice guy, but the war hit him hard (Grief and all that), and he never talked much. We grew up in a fucking palatial Armonia apartment, and he spent most of his time working with his hedge fund in his office, and I was anywhere but.

I was kind of shitty at following rules. I just...I just didn’t care. I seriously sold my cigarettes to other kids during elementary school, set off dry ice bombs on the football field, and, obviously, flipped off multiple teachers. Dad was pressured to send me to a prep school by age fourteen, and knowing him it was a really nice one. Generally kind young teachers, not much bullying, very green and lush. Naturally, I found a great new fuckin’ career climbing out of my dorm window to drink in front of the local convenience store alone. Yeah, substances hit me pretty young. I also managed to be seen as either a brilliant mind or a complete asshole by most of my teachers, depending on how sympathetic they were to me. At least I stayed in. Finally got out with flying colors and hoped to have a similar experience of illicit materials and apathy in college. Then the draft hit, and I was put into the *sarcasm* glorious Federal army.

Basic hit me hard. I lost thirty pounds and a sense of self-worth, I heard the phrase “Rebels” said enough times to drive me insane whenever I heard it, and I think I got my first inklings of a homicidal tendency. There I met the person who would hold a gun to my head and pull the trigger a few years later. I never looked good, but by the end of Basic I looked like a skeleton in fatigues and splattered with mud. They put me through some tests, and apparently I was best as an advance scout/designated marksman. I guess General Kimball thought I wouldn’t play well with others. Eh, I can’t disagree. They put me through a few weeks of wilderness survival, and then my papers were stamped and I was ready to go. I still cough sometimes from ingesting a noxious mixture of herbs meant to cure desert heat stroke. I didn’t have heat stroke, and I got the dosage wrong.

After that little fiasco, Antoine Bitters was a soldier. My new squad, Gold Squad, would team up with squads led by Lts. Jensen and Andersmith, and I would meet my future assassin, Palomo, briefly before he was suddenly recalled to defend Kimball herself. Lucky bastard. Jensen and Andersmith led fine, I guess. They never had to go in. Gold Squad was the advance troops, so we marched for a few hours into the picturesque port city of River Crossing. It was a codename from the initial settlement that was eventually ratified, in case you’re so curious as to why it’s so generic. The place itself is actually somewhat interesting, a large sprawl of thick grasses and short wood buildings. The municipal buildings were brick, but most of the place was whittling gone rogue. Very high-class. Sometimes I would notice a ship go in and out of the port, through the massive steel drawbridge. [Probs a pause here, heavy breathing, just a moment of him musing on it.]

Sorry. I..I just remember River Crossing very vividly. I can still feel the sun, I can trace my way around each and every major avenue, sometimes I get terrified I’m still there, until I force myself to look around. Anyway. They sent us into midtown. Most of the soldiers decided to show off. Our captain liked that kind of thing. They’d walk up and down the streets, try and help civilians, keep them safe, et cetera. A few took the opposite tack, looting the whole place. By the end of the day, the looters had a pile of food and books and tech near the Long Bay Fountain, and the others had decided to join in. From the beginning, I had strong-armed my way into the municipal post office. I lived. Yeah. All those other guys? Federal ordered a set of three bombing raids. All napalm. Like clockwork. I came in with River Crossing the way it was. I came out of the brick place looking at twenty bodies. Some were near the fountain. Others were in what I could barely make out to be beds, having kicked normal people out of them.  One guy shot himself, and it was the corpse that got it. As a kid, I didn’t like people. In the Army I was full of barely-contained rage and terror. When I left that post office? I was betrayed by the place I was born. My loathing became a death wish. I..I just did not care. I never cared, but after that I knew what my life was going to be. Civilians? Fuck them. I was gonna get revenge on the world. On everything.

I gathered the few supplies and food I had left, and began my trek. I found a Warthog probably abandoned by Red Squad during my second day of travels, loaded with a good 60% of the team’s rations. I guess there is a God. The jeep had some other supplies, though the only one that really mattered was an anti-material rifle scope, which I found out I could bolt onto my battle rifle. That took up a day of travel, though, as I figured that shit out. Honestly, though, the challenge was nice. It was something to focus on. Just, driving. Through the grasslands and desert? I swear to god I couldn’t forget anything I saw. I’d see a tree and think it was burning, I’d hear the wind as the sound of bombers flying- *stops* Jesus christ. It was nice to think about something else. Anything else.

I stopped at Lone Hope Hill, and that was where I met the first human being since the bombing. He called himself Felix. Said he was the leader of Presidential Army 38th Battalion, which he was really happy to call the “Grave Pigeons”. Apparently they dug the graves. Honestly, I don’t really care. I told him about my hopes and dreams, and he told me his. I thought getting really super rich was kind of pushing it, and he seemed like a manipulative psycho. For his part, he thought that gunning down people as part of a general dissatisfaction with the human race and due to intense and personal hatred was fucking stupid, and he said I should see if I could get paid for it. I told him to fuck off, and he laughed a little. Luckily, the smug cockbite got his act together and went back to Fort Gary.

I cleaned my gun for the fifth time that day, and kept driving until I ran out of gas, at which point I entered the home of a couple who hadn’t gotten the memo to scram from the battlefield. I shot one of them, who I assumed was nonbinary? I don’t know, there were a few kids at prep school like that. They fell to the floor, and there was a satisfying chunk of head gone. The other one was definitely a woman, and she tried to fight me off with a clawhammer. Got her through the throat, and I don’t think anybody’s gonna sew that up. I took their gas from the garage, pocketed the clawhammer, and fueled on up. After that exercise in misanthropic desperation, I hit the gas and got moving.

Once, a kid with a knife came up to me. Must have been fourteen or something. He looked starved. He hadn’t learned to piss off soldiers, so he started threatening to kill me unless I turned up food, money, or gas. I had rations and gas, but no money. If I was gonna go out the way I wanted to, though, I couldn’t give him any of it. I decided not to kill him immediately. I shot him in the cock and flattened him with the car when he doubled over. Another meaningless human life. Like the couple. Like the owners of the car. Like me.

My final stop was a nearly abandoned Federal guard tower, surrounded by desolate wastes and broken structures. I came to first check if anyone had followed me, and to get some nails and planks to go with my hammer. Trust me. It will make sense. I interrogated one of the few remaining Feds, a rookie named See, at gunpoint, who told me while pissing himself that General Kimball herself was going to make a propaganda speech at the much larger outpost in Melodus, right across the border from Aria. *Snarly voice*. Finally, I approached Federal Army Outpost 16-L. More accurately, I approached a tiny radio tower in the mountains, maybe a quarter-mile out? I skittered up the ladder, military vomit bags, gun, ammunition in a civilian messenger bag looted from the house, and Longshore sniper scope mod all on various parts of my person. Finally, I got up the chattering ladder, and prepared my aim from the balcony. Naturally, I nailed the trapdoor shut with two planks on either end, nailed together as though my life depended on how well these two planks were fastened. It fuckin’ did.

The wind blocked out any sound, and I had to keep my things under my ammo bag to keep some of the lighter stuff from blowing away. I upchucked a couple times, and finally took aim. I hit two medics first, one, then the other. Bam, bam. I think they might have been talking, not that I cared. I could only guess by their hand motions through my scope. Next came an engineer working on a tank. She didn’t even have her helmet on. Hit the floor. Time seemed to slow down. I would aim, and in my head it was….It was horrible. Have you ever hated someone? Wished they would drop dead? Imagine being able to do that. Now imagine you’re Antoine Bitters, and you hate EVERYONE. You despise some random kid as much as your worst enemy. You know, you deeply know, you will die having brought as much misery and death to as many people as possible. And this isn’t some spur-of-the-moment thing. You’ve killed people to plan for this. Your life now means killing yourself and everyone else. Now imagine that in front of you.

Imagine seeing your hands find a target, wait for them to stay still, holding your breath, pulling the trigger, and finding someone else. Imagine that you can’t do anything about it. It’s just reflex. And imagine refusing to fight it. Imagine that you want to die. You want everything to die. You let your hands work. And they do. Blood. Gallons of the stuff. You get headaches. You vomit. You breathe until you start hyperventilating. Your hands tremble on the trigger. On the barrel. And you let them die. You don’t smile, but you’re happy. You’re happy on some level, though it doesn’t register as happiness enough for your brain to take notice. Then the endorphins hit. Then you’re just plain happy. You’re playing trick shots with the motherfuckers. One in the ass. One in the shoulder. One before he gets back inside. One before she saves one of your wounded. Then you can’t stop. Not only do you not want to stop, keeping going is the best thing to ever happen in your life. You are Death.

And then you hear a ringing. In your ears, first, then, a few minutes of killing later, in the metal itself. Someone’s coming up. They knock on the wooden improvised barricade, then they try to crowbar it off. Someone falls off the ladder trying. You would guess he has a concussion, but that was not your world. Your world was that scope, that balcony, and that bag of bullets. Finally, the kid from Basic punches through the trapdoor, presumably now some kind of defender of Kimball, the bitch. It’s a shame. In desperation, you try to shoot. Because you’re desperate, you miss her twice. She runs to  her Pelican, surrounded by a troop of soldiers. She’s going, going, gone. And then you feel something to the side of your head, and it twists, pops a little, and you see your helmet, right there across from you, where you left it. The ringing in your head goes from a swarm of bees to the sound of a buzzsaw cutting flesh, and you see him.

Palomo. The kid. The “Wooer of evil and slayer of women” guy. And he looks pissed. You draw your pistol, but it just disappears from view. He shot first. I guess my body was recovered by the Feds. I really don’t know anything after that, but that’s the story of the smell of high school booze, the taste of military rations, the scent of burning flesh, the touch of that trigger, and when everything went white.

** **

 

> The story of Bitters took months to fully create. In that sense, similarly to how Pvt. Carolina is Larz's character when the chips are down, Bitters in the world of WWH was a character close to my heart. It was a very interesting writing challenge to try and figure out what would drive someone to the state Bitters is in at the end of his life, honestly. I promise you that his story is not the end of the complexities of thus universe's Chorus politics. It is not even the beginning. Bitters was an introverted bystander, and it will be one of the people he left behind who will continue his legacy on a much larger scale.


	7. MP Radio: The (Unscripted) Secret Origin of (this) Bitters

[Video Link: https://youtu.be/zKRhPZUP-ik ](https://youtu.be/zKRhPZUP-ik)

 

Bitters, the character that took over half a year to create. Here's some ramblings from a creator perspective.

Featuring stuttering, Volleyball, and Insane Clown Posse!


	8. Who's Up Next and Who's Playing Who (Installment 1)

Current Schedule (Dates Tentative)

6/18/2015: Connie - DC aka Koruga

(Notes: First DC monologue, and first Red or Blue monologue. This gets into a lot of heavy stuff.)

6/25/13 Felix - Adam aka GollyGamma

(Notes: None)

 

Claimed Characters/D&D alignments (Because MP are nerds) (List is as of now):

[This is like, half our cast page.]

 

Gamma (Gary Marston) - Neutral Evil - Claimed (DC)

Delta (Davis Hargrove) - Lawful Evil- Claimed (DC)

Eta (Ethan Carroll) - Lawful Neutral - (DC)

Theta (Anton Theodore) - Lawful Stupid - Claimed (DC)

Iota (Idoya Carroll) - Chaotic Neutral - Claimed (DC)

Tau (Anne Tate) - Neutral Good - Claimed (DC)

Omega (Edgar O’Malley) - Neutral Evil - Claimed (DC)

Director - Neutral Evil - Claimed (Larz)

Felix - Stupid Evil > Neutral Evil -Claimed (Adam)

Zeta (Richard Simmons) - Lawful Neutral > Lawful Good > Lawful Evil - Claimed (Adam)

Carolina Church - True Neutral - Claimed (Larz)

Connie Tegan and all variations - Chaotic Good - Claimed (DC)

Sigma (Sigmund Anderson) - Neutral Evil - Claimed (Adam)

Superbus - Neutral Evil > Stupid Evil - Claimed (DC)

Corey Oakes - True Neutral > Neutral Evil - Claimed (Adam)

Vanessa Kimball - Lawful Neutral - Claimed (DC)

Emily Grey - True Neutral - Claimed (DC)

Katie Jensen - Lawful Neutral - Claimed (DC)

Antoine Bitters - Chaotic Good > Chaotic Neutral > Chaotic Evil - Claimed (Adam)

John Andersmith - Lawful Good -  Tentatively Claimed (DC)

Carmen Valentina - Chaotic Stupid - Claimed (DC)

Annunzio - Classic Lawful Good - Claimed (DC)

Pyrelighter - Chaotic Neutral - Claimed (Adam)

Tex/Alpha - Neutral Good - Claimed (DC)

 

**As is pretty clear, we've got a universe in mind. We hope you keep enjoying the stories, and stay tuned for more!**


	9. Why We're Here: Connie and CT

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In DC's first debut as a Merc Popcorn writer, we see the rise and fall and other rise of one of our first lead characters! Expect very, very good stuff.

 

Transcript: Connie and CT

You know, when you come to a place like this, you’d expect to be dead or something. You know, like an interview into the afterlife? But I guess I don’t know what to call myself anyway - in naming or in mortality. I’m not exactly in charge anymore, after all.

It’s complicated, so how about we rewind. I started off as a sweet little kid on a colony called Sekhmet-Hathor. Nothing much to see there except a shitton of cliffs, and a few waterfalls, and you get bored of the scenic life real quick. Not to mention a couple of parents who didn’t trust me as far as they could throw me, and three siblings, of whom I was the slacker. And trust me, that’s saying something. Which would be why I took the first shuttle out of there to go to Horace University out on Luna. Yeah, I have a degree. Biotech, in case you wanted to know, and I got a boyfriend while I was there - Corey Oakes, aspiring archaeologist. That turned out well.

Unfortunately, it turns out that having a bachelor’s in biotech and having no interest in any career there is a bit of a bad idea, but in my defence, my other interest was in being a hairdresser, and they didn’t teach classes on that. So, I could either go home and get some of my parent’s money, or I could do what my boyfriend’s drop-out roommate did, and enlist in our glorious army. Which is how I ended up in a box canyon I like to call Blood Gulch, where our story finally begins. It’s a nice place, really. You’ve got all the amenities of home. A person on Red Team that can grow weed, enough paper to make all my wildest and dumbest fan fictions come true, a totally ineffectual opposing team that couldn’t kill us if their lives depended on it - and believe me, they didn’t - and my dear friend Carolina. I even had a shitty boyfriend who sent me packages once a month for a while before….I’m getting ahead of myself.

So it’s fine, and none of us have any responsibilities beyond not dying, and one day this new recruit comes in. Real green, total newbie, named David Wash….something. He might have had another last name, or a different one, but we called him Wash. I think it’s because I said he looked like he’d been through the wash a few too many times - he had more than a few screws loose, and he just looked faded out and kind of pathetic in general. You know what I’m talking about, right?

He wasn’t the important part of the drop, though. We also got a tank, Phyllis. Yeah, because that’s such a great idea, give three soldiers, one of whom purposefully failed every exam she took to get the easiest job, one with enough anger problems to blow up a small planet, and one rookie who couldn’t microwave noodles, a tank. We couldn’t even keep our first captain alive and they gave us a tank. It’s like Command was actively trying to kill us.

Snort. I guess they knew what they were doing for once, because one test run on that tank later and our genius of a leader had five cannon shots to her chest and not even enough time to say anything cool before she died. Her last words were, if I remember right, “Connie, you had better get the damn tank working or I’ll choke you to death with your own smut!” Which I guess is as good a way to die as any.

But again, not the point. She came back after that happened. I know, right? Our leader turned into a ghost and haunted us for the next ten or something years. Such a great person, even death couldn’t stop her from being a total bitch. The only thing good that came out of that was that we got somebody cool in Blood Gulch that wasn’t a Red. I’m referring, of course, to Agent Beta.

Man, that guy was kickass in all the best and all the worst ways you can think of. I know he’s got his weird thing going on with Project Mercenary, and I probably should have paid more attention to that, but I mean fuck it, my best friend was a ghost. Like I was going to pay attention to an AI. Beta is the guy who really kicked things off in Blood Gulch.

First of all, he took the Red Flag and offered to kill them all for us, which I vetoed right off the bat. I mean hello, if they die, where am I going to go next? Somewhere the soldiers actually care about fighting, and I have to be in charge of lives? Hell no, I’m not taking that responsibility on myself! And he was going to do it, kill every last Red, so Wash and I had to work together to do the only thing we could do.

We shot him in the leg.

That was only a temporary solution, though. He was not going to get off our backs so easily, so I guess it’s kind of lucky that our first faux Felix showed up when he did. Gave Beta something to shoot at that wasn’t going to threaten our whole operation.

Now here’s where it gets weird. I know, shocking. So after Beta gets this mortal wound, we call for a medic, who comes way too late and can’t medic for shit (seriously, she recommended putting engine oil on the dead guy’s bullet wound; real genius) and that medic decides that she’d like to go poking around in the catacombs. Yes, I know it’s sort of our fault that we didn’t keep her, but sue me. She was more of a failure at her job than I was.

Even more so when her poking woke up some cockbite buried underneath Red Base and starting driving the Red Team’s mechanic nuts. He started speaking Spanish, it was this whole thing. And then add to that “Felix” fucking us over and me in particular and you can see why this was a fucking stressful time in my life! Second most stressed I’ve ever been, really. The orange prick was trying to kill us all and grab the tech that was in the not-dead-guy-underneath-Red-Base’s body, his phone is merging with the mechanic’s speech unit and going power-crazy, and Beta’s no help because he’s having deep and meaningfuls with Carolina! To put it shortly, we were fucked.

And then it got worse. I’m not talking about how Felix turned out to be my deadbeat boyfriend - yeah, and he tried to shoot me multiple times, both before and after he knew who I was - or how the zombie underneath Red Base woke up and kinda-killed Beta. I’m not even talking about my prodigious novella-in-progress being burned to ash. I’m talking about Reassignment.

Reassignment. One word that you’d think I’d be glad to hear after the bullshit that went down in Blood Gulch. Even an active war zone would have been preferable at that point, I probably could have led a few dumbass soldiers and not gotten my ass killed, but no. Instead, I got to go to a site in the middle of the desert, where all the Reds and Blues had mysteriously disappeared and left only incredibly large blood stains, and get picked up by what I’m pretty sure was a crazy hermit that decided to wear aqua armour for the hell of it. He called himself Gamma, or the Love Doctor, depending on how long it had been since he made a sex joke. He had a laser sword, a weird connection with aliens, and a biological clock about a year away from zero at best. It sucked to be stuck there with him, he was going crazy inside there and it was clear he’d been stuck in that alien temple for way longer than I’d have thought was physically possible. I steered as clear of him as I could, and mostly just talked to the guy on the outside.

You know, it’s funny. The first time I met a Felix, he was a fake who ruined my life for years on the whole romance table and nearly killed me a few times. The second time I met a Felix, he was a phone who ruined everybody’s life for years and nearly killed me a few times. The third time I met a Felix, he hid his identity and ruined my life for years, and nearly killed me a few times. I can’t catch a break! They even had the same way of acting whenever I talked to them. Whenever Felix - the real Felix - talked to me, at least in the beginning, he really acted like he was listening. I was lonely as all hell with Gamma going slowly down the rabbit hole, so I talked to him all the time, about my life before I was in here, about Carrie and Wash, about my burgeoning writing career and my brief foray into hairdressing. This went on for about a year and I, like a fucking idiot, thought he would just listen and not do anything with it.

He split my head in two. Told me I was the reason everyone was gonna die, and I was better off dead. And normally that wouldn’t bother me, you know? I consider myself a healthy person. I eat well, I have a hormonally balanced brain. I live well. But I’d been stuck in there for months by the time he started. And for half a year I had to hear about how awful I was and what a failure I’d been. This was the reason I never went home, okay? Nobody liked me back there! And I couldn’t go anywhere else without new people being disappointed in me. And it just….it got to me, okay? The idea that I was never going to be strong.

Tonal change. I guess this was the only way I could prove him wrong.

This is where I come in. Once Connie broke, C.T. stepped up to bat and fuck Felix up. Call me a coping mechanism if you want, but I got the job done, and I knew what I was doing. The first order of business was to mercy kill Gamma, and take his sword. It did something, and he wasn’t about to use it. Next was to open the temple for the first time in nine months and kill every last son of a bitch on that dig site that had kept me in there and tried to whittle my life away. Third was to tear Felix’s head off, but that was always a stretch goal.

That cockbite ran like a horse in the Triple Crown the second he saw me in his camp. Didn’t even stop to mourn his dead coworkers, though to be fair they were all asswipes too. Now Fate decided I shouldn’t be allowed to follow him, and sent my old friends my way. Well, my old friends plus one.

Yeah, introducing the new girl, probably my fucking replacement. Private Tex, only known survivor of the Valhalla Massacre and Blue Team’s closest thing to a techie. They were here with a Merc to take on Eris Industries, or something like that. And seeing who Felix worked for - what industry has archaeologists digging up alien tech, anyway? - and since I had roughly jack shit else to do, I followed them. Really smart move, going with a renegade Merc Agent and people I already knew were about as good at fighting as a rotten tangerine. But I digress. I’m sure none of you really care, do you?

So here’s what you guys are going to care about. Zeta took Carolina and Tex to confront the mad scientist in charge of that crock of shit, and the maroon dick himself wonderfully died in the process of trying to kill a few of us.

I myself, I had some more important things to do, since clearly nobody was going to help me take down the bastards who ruined my life. You know how it is. You get on the flagship of the company that ruined your life, you’re killing guards left and right, and just as you’re about to get to the bottom of it! You’re knocked out by somebody you called your friend. Carolina decided I wouldn’t make it. Bitter She possessed me long enough to get other people on our side to grab me and try to take me home. You know how that feels? She took away my one shot at victory, because she was “worried” for me or some shit! I was so goddamn close!

But after the ship we were on to go home (with a very loose definition of the word “home”) crashed, I got picked up by a group of soldiers calling themselves the New Republic, pointed at the Federal Army, and told “they’re the bad guys, go kill them.” Now, I was more than happy to do that for a while, but guess who decided to show his pretty face on Chorus just when I was ready to help these rebels?

Felix fucking Supreme. Working under the third faction - of four, actually, so you know that was going to be simple - he was there for what I can only assume was a paycheck big enough to buy a planet. You can imagine my reaction, and about how quickly I veered off the path that was given to me. I would’ve gone AWOL in ten seconds if Wash didn’t physically restrain me from moving. Typical.

Things got complicated after that. Connie decided to come back, and everything just went to hell for me and the planet. I didn’t know when I was going to be Connie, or when I was going to be me, I just knew it needed to stop.

**  
Tone change. And that’s how we became very friendly with Doctor Emily Grey. It took weeks, you know, to fix this bullshit. I’m still not sure how good a job she did, or how much of either of us the finished project is. She sewed the two of us together, I guess you could say. Took the laid-back nature and dislike of killing from me and the ambition and any form of strength from C.T. to put into one person. She calls herself Connecticut, which some people shorten to Connie tone change and some people turn into C.T. tone change Neither of us is in charge anymore. We still exist, I guess, as some fucked-up part of Connecticut’s mind, but she’s not us. And I guess in the end, that’s not a bad thing. Both of us fucked up our chances at this life pretty hard. Maybe Connecticut’s finally the answer. I guess we’ll find out.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As with Bitters, for some reason Youtube has cut off Connie's monologue. I legitimately have no idea why this has only affected the monologues and not MP segments. I blame Sigma myself, but who knows?


	10. Memory Cycle 6702

 

> Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings- Salvador Dali.

Fvtzn, guvf vf gur Qverpgbe! Fgnaq qbja!

Fvtzn, vg'f zr, B'Znyyrl. Erzrzore zr, lbh vafnar yno eng?

V nz fbeel, Fvtzn. Lbh ner...hafgnoyr..sbe bhe arrqf. V jvfu lbh gur orfg bs yhpx, gehyl.

TRG BHG BS ZL URNQ!

Url gurer, lbh zrybqenzngvp shpx. Pnyy zr Fhcreohf.

Uryyb, Znvar.

TRG BHG BS ZL URNQ!

****

**_Ice._ **

**_Dirt._**

**_Blades._ **

**_Fire._ **

**_Her._ **

**_Her._ **

**_Always her._**

**_Metal._ **

**_Always metal._ **

_Memory databanks, replay logs for the last time._

**_We were the Meta, and they have found me._ **

 


	11. The Good Guys Always Win- Felix in Why We're Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy. Felix as a character is pretty standard. Liar without lying, talks too much, sociopathic, classic villain stuff.
> 
> But what if he was a bit smarter?
> 
> Yeah, this was a fun one to write, even if Youtube keeps screwing over the uploads. As always, if we figure out a way to stop that, the videos will be back online, otherwise just enjoy the sweet plots!

 

Felix Transcript:

Yeah. Hey. My name’s Felix Rojas Park, but don’t look up those last two online. You won’t find anything. I was the third kid of Catalina and Lucius Park, but they went out to six. Ever try living in a big house with a lot of family? It sucks. I highly recommend against.

Naturally, I did what a smart kid would do. I picked the worst of them off, one by one. First came little bro, age four, when I was 10. I stuffed him in a duffel bag then threw him off of the clock tower and ran. Stupid kid made his only interesting sound when he was fuckin’ chunky salsa after the fall. Luckily, even then I could look innocent.

Honestly, going for a fall like that in town was a stupid risk of me. I should have beat him to death with a shovel and just buried him, probably outside of school. That would be a lot safer.

Next came Richard, real big motherfucker. He nearly tried to drown me in the pool once, to “teach me to swim”. I duct-taped cinderblocks to his legs and put tape over his mouth. Then he went off the diving board. Into the woods, his body went. I had to explain tearfully about how he must have ran away. So many fake tears were shed that day.

Then in middle school, this fucker Bobby was going to rat me out for selling beer. I stabbed my pet cat, Horatio, to death with Daddy’s hunting knife and stuffed the corpse into his bag. I called the cops, and he was fuckin’ arrested on animal abuse and destruction of property. *Laugh*

Onto more constructive matters, in high school I built an AI based off of myself. Superbus. It was pretty simple stuff, no Alpha or anything. He was a smug, maniacally laughing dickweed, but I kept him on my phone for a while.

Anyway, I finally, a few years later, beat my darling, favorite of the Park clan sister to death with a sledgehammer, torched the body with some lighter fluid I bought at the hardware store, and ran like hell. It was then that I was sure I’d have to bail, so I ordered Superbus to wipe any legal records of my last two names (If I got rid of Felix I’d slip up when someone asked my name, duh.).

I’m really, really glad I made him good at something, and that something happened to be injecting code into shitty local planetary government databases. I made my age 18, and went off to join the Navy. Boy, did that go well.

I was stationed on a few ships during the war, but none that would be as significant or annoying as the Steed of War’s ship, the UNSC Antietam. That’s what the Covvies called our beloved Captain. The Steed of War. As if war itself rode in on this motherfucker. His name then was Gabriel Luz, but now he’s some legend or whatever named Locus.

Anyway, he was a dick. He shot me in the foot once. Not the worst thing in the world, but don’t do it to kill some time. I, meanwhile, was kicking ass on the ground in my own special way. They colloquially called me the Smiling Devil, but the guys and I would joke about how they noticed under my helmet. The smiling was mostly when I’d get a captive Elite. I like to fuck around with barbed wire enough to get a reputation. I think that’s enough said.

Speaking of barbed wire, after months of this insufferable cockbite’s pretentious “true soldier” bullshit, we got a very annoying new guy. They called him Soda Pop, since I offered him a Pepsi once and he crushed the can. I was going to call him Dipshit, but Soda Pop was the preferred name.

Apparently, oddly enough, he was a SPARTAN reject. Fear of heights, so he was just kicked to Navy. Explained his freakish size. It was right after he started getting more fans than me that I decided to start teaching him his place.

Look, I got more mature after the war. I just was kind of insecure, at this point. I stopped the whole “pointless violence” deal later, when I learned how to win friends and influence people.

I KO’d him with some heavy stuff in his (now trademark) soda, removed his helmet and chestplate, and stretched out a length of razor wire over his neck. Then, I clapped my hands, and in surprise he sat up, carving out a chunk of his throat. I then took his head and moved it up and down on the wire, finally stabbing him in the gut a few times.

They took him to the hospital, but if Soda Pop wasn’t dead by then, he was *with glee* never, ever gonna talk. Then they kicked him out the airlock, so he’s definitely dead. No question. After that little fiasco, I had to think fast before I got my ass killed by the other crewmates. So, I showed some of the info on Luz’s battle strategies to the higher ups. Some words to describe them would be “Chaotic.” “Human Wave Doctrine.” “Employing unsafe levels of aerial bombardment”, and “Holy shit did he just drop ANOTHER nuke?”

He did the job great, but once I showed them how he did it it would be a terrible political decision to keep him around. They were going to brig him for life, but then he disappeared and became the Legend of Locus. I know that it’s the same guy because Luz used to call himself Locus when he had his occasional war flashbacks. Fuckin’ pussy!

With some clever talking on my part and my “proficiency at defeating the enemy”, I was made Acting Captain. Awesome. I had a whole battlecruiser to command. Not sure if that’s the official name, but go Felix! I am just amazing, aren’t I? But then the photos of MY little actions came to light, specifically how apparently there is a line you can cross in “interrogation”.

Well, then I was taught not to be a dick if it ain’t gonna help ya. Lesson learned. They were going to send me to some shithole named Blood Gulch, but I found a guy working for Eris Industries, with an asshole mohawk and a possessive love life. He took my cash, my phone, and my armor, and I took a job from Eris digging up alien relics at Sandtrap. Boring job, but the whole team loved me. Thought I was the nicest guy. How cute.

So, I’m commanding Blye and Lance to survey Area 4 for the fifth time in the day, and then I hear some talking, inside the great big fuckin’ alien temple. One guy, one girl. So, I start talking to them both through the giant-ass door.

I tell the guy there’s alien sex shit or something in the back of the temple buried, and I think that gets rid of him for a while. But the girl? Oh-hoh, the girl. I start talking, same time every day. Gets her feeling comfortable. I hear her life. I hear about her friends. Hell, I even hear about her possessive boyfriend. Guess who that guy is?

The Blood Gulch dupe! Man. Life can really be funny. Anyway, her friends are going to die, due to something that’s out there. She doesn’t know much, but I’ve got enough.

Since I hadn’t really totally fully gotten over my tendency to do evil for the fun of it, I decide to break her. I essentially, over the course of seven months or so, beat the message of “They’re all in danger and you’ll never be strong enough to help them. You’re weak. You’re pointless. You cannot help anyone.”

She eventually seemed to give in, heaving, crying, the works. Then there’s a silence. A few days later, I get a report from Blye. There’s somebody. Somebody unknown. Somebody’s killing off diggers. Sangheili. Human. They don’t care.

Someone is- And then I turned around, and decided to do my searches that night. 3 AM. I know whoever they are is likely asleep or dealing with the problems of a lack of sleep, and therefore vulnerable. I’ve drank my caffeine, so I’m safer.

I survey the bodies. Basically everyone on the west side of the site has been killed, all seemingly via blunt force except a few, who had bullet wounds.

I’m pretty sure at this point that the killer’s Connie, which is bolstered by the fact that the first blunt force killing was to Agent Gamma, the guy in the temple, who must have used his laser sword to open the door for her. I guess the sword finally worked or something. You know alien tech. Fickle.

Naturally, I run from somebody with a confirmed kill count of “everybody here but me”, and take the first Eris shuttle out, where I’m “relocated” to Chorus, to serve Gamma in controlling General Kimball.

Before that, though, something amazing happens. I actually go out of my way to save the life of other human beings. It’s insane, but let me tell you how I got to that point. So, Zeta’s all set up to get these Sim Troopers to testify against Dr. Allison Church, and, well.. frankly, I don’t care about that shit, and I’m not being paid to.

At this point, I’ve decided I’m way more than Delta’s little bicycle courier, and I decide to fuck some shit up, since I’m quitting anyway. I’m worth more than this bullshit. I get Billy to fly me down to Blood Gulch (Zeta’s been giving us a damn travelogue what with all his talking about the mission), and, well, I rappel down from 60 feet up and snap the fucker’s neck 180 degrees.

He keels over and I see, you guessed it. Soda Pop. He lived. Somehow. I guess he activated armor lock or something all those moons ago. I drill him in the chest with an entire magazine of submachine gun rounds, but even before that his eyes weren’t bright and competent like before. They’re dead.

Dead grey lumps of lead, rotating in his skull. I don’t know what the fuck happened to Soda Pop, but it showed in those eyes. How literary. Anyway, I kneel down to the corpse, and well, I act. I do my thing. I take his head in a hand and talk to it about just the LONG and COMPLEX path that he’s taken. Oh, what justice! I mock like a goddamn Bond villain, but then, after a minute or so, I get to the good stuff. The reason why I evoked my old idiotic and gratuitous evil.

I get into Dr. Church, and with some clever word choices and information on her current location, I send those Sim Trooper kiddies on a quest. But, you know, then I had shit to do, and a President Gary Marston gave me a job opportunity in the field of civil services.

With a bit of ass-kissing and a ton of hard work, I become Captain of the Grave Pigeons. That’s not the actual name of the 38th Army Battalion, but it just sounds so much better.

In name, we dig the graves after the Glorious President’s just and righteous battles. However, the Grave Pigeons also have a more secretive mission, which is to erase dissidents from history, anonymously forcing newspapers from publishing things about them, killing families, all that fun stuff.

I got really, really good at that. Hell, I even got to establish a bit of a rapport with our Glorious President Gary Marston. Sure, I don’t trust him and he doesn’t trust me, but he doesn’t trust anyone, really, and I help him with the more social aspects of his job as a side detail. I got really, really good at that too.

Let me tell you guys a little story. Once, on my normal rounds of the edge of Presidential territory, I met a kid named Bitters. He had a big bag full of bullets and he told me he was gonna shoot up a military base. He said “Nothing matters, I don’t matter, you don’t matter, hell, maybe we don’t even fuckin’ exist. I’m going to do the only thing I can and cause as much misery and death as I can before I go out.”

I look this kid, square in the eye, and say “Look. You’re missing the point of life. You get paid. It’s how we live! It is the lifeblood that builds our society. If you’re going to be a nihilistic bitch, then at least try and get something out of it!”

Seriously, why do some people even bother to do things that could be fun if they’re just going to mess it up for themselves? It’s totally insane. So the kid goes and leaves, probably to ruin his life like a moron or something, I don’t care.

After that, I spent a good while just resting and doing my oh so fun new job until opportunity came a-knocking. A series of illicit messages later, and I had supplied a (frankly insane) group of Federal rogue pilots with the only Presidential nuclear warhead, an unusable and pointless monster of 30 megatons.

They, however, had a great use for it, which was to, and I can’t contain my laughter, blow up one of their own cities! It’s like God just throws these things into my lap! I sell them the bomb for enough to pay for a new tank squadron and some needed updates for the surveillance systems watching the Hoovervilles around Fort Marston. And guess what these crazies do with *mocking* “Nergal”?

They drop it on fucking Nocturne. Fifth biggest city in the country, city of the Federal North Mint,  and host of the Federal Spaceport (I know it’s derelict, but it’s the thought that counts.) Think of all the damage I just did, and that’s in no way directly attributable to me! All through a measly sale. Suckers.

Anyway, eventually, it got to the point where I made myself central and irreplaceable in what the Grave Pigeons did and what my social duties as the newly-created office of State Commissar entailed.

Essentially, by the end of the Chorus Civil War it got to the point where Felix was as important a name as Marston. In the fantasy novels the good-guy general always goes and rebels against the vile leader, but, man. Why rebel when everyone already wants to serve the Noble and Wise President Marston and you’re the guy who. Writes. His. Speeches? *laugh*. And then it got better from there.

**  
**


	12. Dear Leonard...

Jan 3 2550,

> Dear Leonard, 
> 
> I've decided to start writing these little logs using the shreds of spare time I have to keep you updated. When I bring you back, I'll send you all of these en masse. Today, I begun the Theta work. What a waste. I was never one for psychology, but the Counselor tells me that we will get a perfectly loyal soldier, so hopefully we will get results with his little pet project.
> 
> Otherwise, the Omega work has been going swimmingly. The skeletal modification is doing its' job, and we're using whatever anesthetic "Doc" (Pilot 802) can provide. By the screams of pain I'm beginning to question his skill as a "medic".

Feb 10 2550,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> I miss you. I know you always said that when you went to war you were defending humanity, but look at me. In a few years we'll have an army of Omega troopers to do what you could not. You should never have let them kill you.

May 23 2550,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> Gary Marston is a pain in my ass. When I bring you back I advise you to avoid him.

July 11 2550,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> I can't let them track us. We have too many losses, we need to protect the four we still have. I'm going to try and play with Marston's DNA to make it harder for the goddamn bureaucrats to shut us down for cheap political favor. The Project must go on.

October 1 2550,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> Sigma is showing signs of danger. He keeps requesting access to the Internet and is getting more brazen in his treatment of his test administrators.

October 1 2550,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> Sigma is not stable.

October 2 2550,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> If you come back and Sigma is still around, he can destroy you. That can never happen.

October 3 2550,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> Sigma is on ice. You are safe.

October 24 2550,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> Your ungrateful child keeps talking to me in my dreams. Her and Delta need to shut the fuck up.

Jan 1 2551,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> Happy New Year! If you were alive I would take time out of my busy schedule to celebrate with you. All in due time.

Jan 22 2551,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> As you lie in your grave I've created Beta. He isn't you. That I'm sure of. At least I got rid of the child.

Feb 3 2551,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> Beta is nothing more than your shadow. Another year wasted.

Oct 14 2551,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> A year from the Mark One fiasco that we spent so much time trying to bury with the new project. I guess Delta's celebrating by beginning a new company and getting into politics. Slimy little shit.

Nov 26 2551,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> I won't let them stop science. Stop you. There isn't a difference between the two.

Nov 30 2551,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> Why isn't Beta right? He should be right! I'll have to ask you when I get you right.

March 3 2552,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> I hate the damn bureaucrats, I hate Delta's insidious subversion of my project, I hate everything I can see. This is all a waste, isn't it? No. I need to get you right. Beta is just one. I can make a hundred iterations if I need to.

April 14 2552,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> I miss you always.

June 20 2552

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> I do not believe in gods or spirits but I hope you come from the grave as a revenant and destroy my goddamn child and goddamn Zeta and the nutjob who's using the Sigma name and all of them! All of them are destroying you!

September 1 2552

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> Delta took everything but the plan for you. Theta has come with me to a secluded bunker. There, I'll get you right.

October 29 2552

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> Beta-33 showed promise, but did not follow through. Shame.

October 31 2552

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> I hope you aren't inside of Beta-41, because I just set that robot on fire. I know you weren't in there. I'm not going to write these for a while, Leonard. It's all or nothing. I do not need distractions.

March 2 2553,

> Dear Leonard,
> 
> I'm writing this in front of Pvt. Carolina Church, our daughter. I failed you. [There is a long splatter of blood across the archaic paper recording surface.]

 

 


	13. No Update

I am very, very sorry, from all of us at Merc Popcorn, but due to a current lack of material we have nothing really to update for today.

We will work to try and keep this kind of thing from happening again.

The buffer was outpaced, essentially.


End file.
